You can’t deny that Green Day’s “Dookie” is a legendary album. Therefore, when we heard that frontman Billie Joe Armstrong had given a tell-all interview regarding its first single “Longview”, we just had to twist an article out of it. To say we were let down when his big reveal turned out to be that it was about jacking off would be a huge understatement. Yeah, dude. We knew that already.
According to the interview, Armstrong apparently thought he was conveying new information by telling his interviewer that he got the song’s inspiration while sitting around in a fit of self-indulgent Onanism. Honestly, how fucking stupid does he think we are? What did he think we thought the song was about, anyway? Golf? Unbelievable.
OK, we suppose we’ll give him the benefit of a doubt. Maybe he thinks people don’t pay close attention to what he’s saying in his music. Smartphones have probably killed some of our innate curiosity with stuff like that, and it’s not like MTV plays “Say What?” anymore. Perhaps we’re being too tough on him, and it’s really not a big deal that he said this in his interview.
Actually, fuck that. He clearly says the word “masturbation” in the song. We take back that last paragraph. How insulting can a guy be to his fans? We’ve been listening to his music for the last 30 years. Well, to be fair, we’ve been casually aware of his music for 30 years. Still, he should be more cognizant of the average intelligence of people who are aware of his music. How out of touch has he gotten over the past three decades?
It’s not like we were expecting the scoop of the century, here, just something interesting. What’s next? Is Vitamin C going to tell us “Graduation (Friends Forever)” is about graduation? Is John Fogerty going to reveal that “Centerfield” is about baseball? For fuck’s sake, dude. Throw us a bone.
Oh well, we guess we’ll just move on from this and try to put more thought into our pitches going forward. Actually, we just read the rest of the interview, and it turns out Armstrong also revealed that “Dookie’s” artwork is a reference to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Goddamnit. That’s much more interesting. We really should have read the entire thing before we wrote this.